– "I learned that folks don't usually kill themselves in the middle of composing the suicide note." A meditation on Saul Bellow's peculiar style of despair, for what would have been his 94th birthday.

– Typically, when asked to reply to a critical letter in a highbrow journal, writers offer a display of petulant superiority. But John Lanchester, faced with an embarrassing slip in his article on the financial crisis, provides a single sentence that manages to 'fess up, crack a joke – and – plug his next book. Hats off.